Every time you change your underwear someone has to wash it,
iron it, fold it and put it away. During our formative years, that
person was our mother, and for some of us, it still is. The average
housewife with even a modicum of hygiene will do about fourteen loads of laundry
a week; more if she has a large family. Nowadays, getting the job done
is a matter of carting the dirty clothes into the laundry room, separating
it into whites, colors, and disgustingly filthy, dumping one pile into a washing
machine, pouring in suitable amounts of soap, bleach, spot removers, and
softeners, setting the timer, and pushing Start.

Some forty minutes later, the
laundress must return, transfer the first load into a dryer after removing the
all-cotton clothing to air dry. She will stuff the remainder into a dryer,
set the timer, and shove the colored clothing into the emptied washer, again set
the timer, push start, and run back to her inside chores for another forty
minutes.

At this point, she returns to the
laundry room to remove the whites to be folded, reset the dryer to permanent
press, again separate the delicates, dump the rest in the dryer, push a button,
and address the really nasty pile. She will change the temperature
setting, and water level, put the clothes in with immense amounts of bleach,
stain killers, and a lethal detergent, push that button, and hurry back inside
to figure out how to accommodate the different diets of her hungry
family.. By the time she organizes a balanced meal for her vegetarian, a
digestible one for the two year old, something that won’t give her teenager
diabetes, and an exotic dish to remind her husband that he is special, the drier
buzzer sounds, and she is back in the laundry room folding the colored clothing,
stuffing the now gleaming work clothes into the dryer.

A routine like this might kill a
morning but it is a piece of cake compared to what my grandmother did in the
1920’s. Sunday night, she separated the family’s dirty clothes into whites,
colors, and the unrecognizable, and put kindling in the wood stove in the wash
house to light the next morning. The wash house was a small shed just
outside the back door with a big stove and three immense three legged laundry
tubs.

On Monday morning, my grandmother
was up at five so she could start the laundry water, then go into the kitchen to
boil water for washing, and cooking. She set the table, mixed the batter
for biscuits, set out the eggs, and bacon, mixed oats, and water in a large pan
to simmer, and she returned to the laundry. She hauled the pot of boiling
water outside, and poured it into the first laundry tub. She added Crystal White
Soap, and the pile of white clothes. She stirred the mixture with an old
broomstick, and rubbed the bad spots on a rub board to get them out.

While the clothes were simmering,
she hurried back into the kitchen to set the table, start the bacon, and cover
the porridge so it wouldn’t get gummy. She shoved the biscuits into the
oven, and returned to the wash house. She filled the second tub with cold
water, transferred the white clothes into it, and boiled the colored clothes in
the same water she had used for the first batch. She hurried back to the kitchen
to save her biscuits, and fry the eggs. She dished out the porridge with
plenty of fresh butter, and jam from last year’s strawberries.

While her family gobbled up this
immense repast guaranteed to give them early heart attacks, endless
embolisms, diabetes, and a cholesterol count in the thousands, she
galloped back into the wash house to remove the colored clothes from the wash
water, and boil the jeans, and work clothes. She wrung the water out of the
whites, and transferred them to the third tub now filled with cold water she had
dragged from the pump just outside the back door. Then she hurried back inside
to clear the table, send her children off to school, and her husband to
work.

She returned to the laundry stove
to boil the starch until it clabbered, and pray it wouldn’t get lumps or she’d
have to start over. She dipped the white clothes in the starch, wrung them out,
and carried them outside. She wiped off the lines strung across the
back yard, and hung them to dry. She ran back into the wash house, wrung the
water out of the colored clothes, dipped them in the starch liquid, dumped the
work clothes into the clean rinse water, emptied the soapy water into the
vegetable garden, hung the colored clothes, and rinsed the jeans in the second
tub of water.

She returned to the house to do
the breakfast dishes, and make the beds, and then rushed outside to wring out
the work clothes, and hang them on the line. By late afternoon, the clothes were
dry enough, and she managed to get the sheets off the line without dragging them
into the grass very much. She folded them, and put them between the
mattresses, and springs of the beds so they’d be pressed when it was time for
her change the beds on Wednesday morning. She took down the rest of the
clothes, and sprinkled them for the next day’s ironing, finished dusting, set
the table, and started the soup for dinner.

The next day after her usual
morning routines, she put five or six irons on the kitchen stove to heat, and
tested them with spit to see if they were hot enough. She wiped the bottom
of each iron with a cloth to get the soot off, and created an ironing surface by
covering the kitchen table with a quilt. Just when she finished ironing the last
shirt, my mother, her three sisters, and her brother came trooping into the
house demanding cookies, and milk. “First change into your play clothes,”
my grandmother would say. “And put the dirty ones in the laundry
hamper.”

Hooray for progress!
Today’s mothers accomplish procedure in two leisurely hours. In fact, all their
housework has been simplified. Now, they have time for community
service, car pooling, and a job outside the home. The only task they haven’t
streamlined is the time it takes to become a mother. It still takes them nine
months to make a baby.